The Internet is employed to distribute a wide range of electronic content. One of the most common ways is to publish is on a Web site. An electronic content publisher may be an organization, an institution, or an individual. For example, news organizations, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, publish news stories, individuals post articles on various subjects in Web journals (i.e., “blogs”), and musicians post songs to be listened to or downloaded. Commercial entities (individual or organizational) may use the Internet to publish listings for their goods or services. For example, online retailers may employ their own Web sites to sell their products or may use an intermediary service to do so (e.g., Amazon.com). Likewise, individuals may sell their products via personal Web pages or may use intermediary services, such as online auctions sites (e.g., eBay.com) or online classified ad services (e.g., Craig's List). Additionally, a content publisher may distribute electronic advertising content. Electronic advertising content is distinct from other forms of electronic content distributed via the Internet. Electronic advertising content is created by a commercial entity in order to drive usage and/or or sales of a particular good or service. It is not merely content associated with a good or service, but rather is distributed specifically to entice an individual to use or purchase the good or service.
Publishing electronic content on the Internet involves making it available via a Web page in the hope that an individual will access the Web page and view it. Unlike traditional forms of media, it may be difficult for a content publisher to determine levels of readership accurately. For example, a newspaper publisher may be able to estimate how many individuals read its periodical based upon newsstand sales and subscription levels. However, the same newspaper publisher may have a difficult time determining how many individuals have accessed its Web site content. Tracking services such as Google Analytics and Site Meter offer utilities for this purpose, but they are not without their flaws. For example, such services often determine readership by placing a cookie on a user's computer via his Web browser. However, if the user's browser privacy settings prohibit cookie-usage, the tracking service is ineffective. If the user deletes the cookie, the tracking service may have to generate another one when the individual next visits the site, thereby counting the same individual multiple times. Furthermore, even if such tracking services manage to track a reader accurately, they provide little data about the individual reader, such as his characteristics, how he discovered the electronic content, and whether he shared the content with another person.
Furthermore, current methods for sharing electronic content are not typically traceable by the content publisher and, as such, these methods provide little benefit to the content publisher. For example, services such as Digg and Delicious allow users to save the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) (also called a “link”) associated with electronic content and share the URL with other users. While this is useful for the users, it does not provide the content publisher with any particular benefit other than providing another avenue of distribution. As nearly any URL may be shared via these services, this does not provide one content publisher with an advantage over the other. Apart from a content publisher using such as service as a user itself and searching the service for its own content, the content publisher cannot determine which of its content has been shared, who has shared it, and how many times it has been shared. Other services, such as Google Notebook and Evernote allow users to “cut-and-paste” electronic content to an electronic notebook (i.e., rather than storing a link) and share this content. When this is done, the stored content is no longer linked to the originating source and therefore the content publisher completely lacks a method for determining which of its content has been shared via such services.
For at least the aforementioned reasons, current electronic content storage and sharing methods offer inadequate benefits to content publishers.
Like other forms of electronic content, distributing electronic advertising content, herein referred to as an “electronic ad,” involves publishing the content on a particular section of a Web page in the hope that a consumer will see it when viewing the Web page. Typically, the Web page's primary purpose is to distribute another form of electronic content. For example, an electronic ad may be placed on a Web page whose primary purpose is to provide users with online games. Advertising on the Internet involves an enormous market that has been growing steadily since 1995. Massive sums of money have been spent on advertising on the Internet, including tracking the performance of electronic ads and targeting advertisements to particular audiences using technologies. Yet of all electronic ads distributed on Web sites, only about 1% are clicked. Electronic advertising content publishers, such as ad providers and advertisers, have perpetually grappled with the problem of low response rates.
An electronic ad may be created so that its distribution may be tracked and evaluated. For example, an electronic ad may include computer code that enables an advertiser to ascertain how many times it has been viewed (e.g., how many “impressions” or “clicks”). Electronic ad tracking may be conducted for financial purposes. For example, an ad provider may charge for ad distribution on a per viewing basis. An advertiser may be responsible for paying the ad provider each time the ad is viewed or fee for a particular amount of viewings.
Generally, electronic advertising works in the following way: a Web site publisher designates space on its Web site as available for advertising. An ad provider provides the Web site publisher with a computer code to be implanted in this ad space. An ad provider is an entity that distributes electronic ads via a network (e.g., the Internet) on behalf of an advertiser, usually for a fee, such as Google AdSense, Yahoo, and the like. An advertiser is an entity wishing to promote a good, service, or the like. When an individual visits a particular page of the Web site via his Web browser, the page is generated per the Web site publisher's source code, while the electronic ad is generated in the ad space per the ad provider's code. The electronic advertising content is retrieved from the ad provider's ad server and fills the ad space on the Web page. The ad server maintains electronic advertising content, typically configured by the ad provider on behalf of an advertiser. Each time a visitor visits a Web page, a new set of electronic ads may be displayed because the Web site publisher may have business relationships with more than one ad provider or because the same ad provider may choose a different set of electronic ads to show on the Web page. Furthermore, the electronic content code itself may specify various ads to be shown in the ad space and the ad displayed may vary per the user's particular visit to the Web page. A user may select an electronic ad, such as by clicking it, and his Web browser typically is then directed to present a landing page associated with the advertiser. The landing page is typically the advertiser's main Web page. For example, a user selecting an electronic ad for a dating service will be presented with the dating service's home page.
Due to the particularities of electronic advertising content, it may be difficult to store electronic ads for future viewing, sharing, and the like. A user cannot simply bookmark or save a Web page and assume that the next time he accesses the Web page the electronic advertising content will be the same. The Web site publisher may change its ads periodically and electronic ads may be dynamic and, therefore, inherently storage prohibitive. For example, an electronic ad may involve JavaScript code which is executed on the user's Web browser. The JavaScript code accesses the ad server in real-time to retrieve the computer code needed to render an ad on the user's browser. This form of electronic ad cannot be extracted from the Web browser. In fact, the content code is specifically designed to be safe and hidden from other code executed on the same browser and on the same Web page. This level of security makes it difficult to extract the visual and informational content of the ad automatically for storage and later retrieval or sharing. A user may cut-and-paste the electronic ad from the browser into another document, but that action is time consuming and error-prone. For example, the copied ad may contain code that only functions properly when the user's Web browser is at the appropriate Web site. When an ad is cut-and-pasted from the user's Web browser, and the user attempts to view it later, the user's computer may not be able to employ the extracted content code accurately. In some cases, a cut-and-paste operation also will not copy certain ad server access codes or identification codes that may be used by the ad server to keep track of the ad for accounting and billing purposes, thereby interfering with accurate tracking of the electronic ad.
For at least the aforementioned reasons, electronic advertising content does not inherently lend itself for storage and sharing by individual Internet users.
What is needed is a mechanism to improve the distribution and redistribution of both standard electronic content and electronic advertising content. In particular, what is needed is to a system and method for providing individuals with a seamless mechanism for storing electronic content for subsequent viewing and providing a mechanism to accomplish the later viewing, while also providing electronic content publishers with a convenient mechanism to determine the distribution and audience of their electronic content.